House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was dragged Sunday by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) over having dragged out efforts to force the Justice Department to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein, with the Kentucky Republican proclaiming Johnson to have “finally learned his lesson” after being forced to schedule a vote on the issue for next week.
“I think he finally learned his lesson. He should have brought this to the floor back in July or September,” Massie told The Washington Post in its report Sunday. “He drug this out. It’s caused nothing but political pain when he could have done the right thing politically, but also morally by bringing this to the floor immediately.”
Renewed calls for the DOJ to release its files on Epstein – the disgraced financier who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges – kicked off in July after the agency concluded that it could not identify any co-conspirators of Epstein’s, and that he had, in fact, died by suicide, contrary to speculation that he may have been killed.
The DOJ subsequently closed its investigation into Epstein and potential co-conspirators, a decision that outraged many MAGA supporters and Democratic voters alike. Johnson initially pushed back against legislative efforts to continue the investigation, including one launched by Massie through what’s known as a discharge petition, a tool that can circumvent legislative leadership and force a vote on a particular measure after receiving 218 signatures.
Johnson refused to schedule any bill for a vote that would have compelled the DOJ to release its files on Epstein, forcing Massie to pursue his discharge petition, which last week received enough signatures and forced Johnson to schedule a vote on the Epstein bill for this week.
President Donald Trump’s name appears thousands of times in the relatively small sampling of Epstein files that the House Oversight Committee has released in recent weeks, and Trump himself has launched an aggressive campaign to block the vote on the Epstein bill.
Massie, however, doesn’t believe that Trump is implicated in the files, and dismisses Trump’s opposition to seeing them released as an effort to protect his friends and donors from embarrassment.
“I think this is all about the president trying to protect his friends and his donors,” Massie told the Post.